Threaded Comment System
I'm currently working on threaded comment systems. Comment threads allow you to reply to a comment. This is a feature that the users are clamoring for on Vloggerheads because it is a popular feature on YouTube . Even the trolls are wondering when we are going to have this feature. One of the more amusing aspects of this project is the ongoing video commentary from the peanut gallery. It is like having Bill O'Reilly doing vicious news reports about the progress, or lack of progress, of your project.
There are surprisingly few examples of threaded comment systems. I can't think of any good examples. Let me know of any open source web applications that have this feature. WordPress does not allow replies to blog comments. Community Server also does not have this feature.
The Ning platform is proving to be a bad choice for building a social networking site. Recently there was a huge controversy over their decision to ban Widget Laboratory, an independent software company that provided many widgets for Ning Network Creators. There have been many articles about this on TechCrunch so the whole blogosphere is abuzz about this nasty public fight. You can read about it at: Ning Shuts Down Premium Developer WidgetLaboratory. I think Vloggerheads was using widgets from WidgetLaboratory and planned to have them develop a few features. For two days Ning even suspended my SFTP and WebDav access to my site's file system so I was unable to continue my work. So I'm really not happy with the capricious control Ning has over this project.
I've been exploring various options for creating a social networking site for vlogging. Unfortunately there are web applications for video sharing sites and web applications for social networks but nothing that combines the two. Currently I'm considering PHPMotion for the video sharing side of things and Elgg for the social networking groundwork. They are both open source web applications based on PHP, MySQL, and Apache. So you may be wondering why I don't consider something based on ASP.NET, my area of expertise.
I think the primary reason for not going with ASP.NET is the lack of open source web applications based on ASP.NET. The only thing we have is DotNetNuke. DotNetNuke is a content management system and I doubt that it can be customized to have both social networking and video sharing features. However, the PHP community has a wealth of open source web applications; WordPress, Joomla, Elgg, PHPMotion, CakePHP, MediaWiki, OsCommerce, etc. Although I would be sacrificing my experience, I gain a considerable amount of groundwork if I lean towards PHP, MySQL, and Apache. ASP.NET really needs a lot more sophisticated open source web applications and frameworks to compete with the LAMP stack.
At the moment, I am translating my VB.NET code for comment threads into PHP so I can use it on Ning or Elgg or PHPMotion. This is proving to be very time consuming and difficult but not impossible because PHP has DOM classes for XML manipulation which closely correspond to .NET's XmlDocument class. I need to reorganize the comments into a hierarchy that reflects the comment thread. This can then be applied to nested ordered list HTML tags. XML is a good choice for the necessary hierarchy although other options would be sorted arrays, XSL using JavaScript, pure JavaScript to manipulate the DOM, or directly sorting and ordering database records.